Viewing adult content on a mobile leads a quarter to malware

Viewing adult content on a mobile leads a quarter to malware

The most dangerous place for mobile users to be is on pornography sites, as users have a high risk of finding a malicious result.

According to Blue Coat's 2013 Mobile Malware Report, the most dangerous place for mobile users was pornography and more than 20 per cent of the time that a user went to a malicious site, they were coming from a pornography site.

While data from its WebPulse service finding that mobile users were going to pornography sites less than one per cent of the time, when they do visit pornography sites, they have a high risk of finding a threat.

It said: “Interestingly, when malware first moved to the internet, pornography was one of the leading sources of malware for desktop users. The prevalence of pornography as the leading threat vector for desktop users has ebbed, giving way to attacks that target much larger user populations, such as search engine poisoning.

“In the desktop environment, pornography continued to fall as a threat vector as it became easier to target a large number of users on places like search engines or social networking sites. It is reasonable to expect that the same will be true for the mobile environment, especially considering that in both environments pornography is not a frequently requested category of content.”

Also featuring highly were searched for content rated as ‘suspicious', while ‘malvertising' attacks are now beginning to be targeted against mobile users having been targeted against desktop users for several years.

The report also found around 400 samples of malware targeted Android each month in 2012, apart from in June when it reached more than 1,000, a 600 per cent increase in Android malware over the same period last year and the highest since November 2011, when detected threats peaked at just over 500 for the month.

SC Media UK arms cyber-security professionals with the in-depth, unbiased business and technical information they need to tackle the countless security challenges they face and establish risk management and compliance postures that underpin overall business strategies.